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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Spanning the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Emerging Policy Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.